Can You Find Your Ancient Statue Twin? This Museum Thinks So.

By Annie Garau on February 1, 2017

Oli Scarff/Getty Images

Have you ever had a friend swear they saw you out and about, while you were actually somewhere totally different?

It’s a weird feeling to know that there are people who look freakishly similar to you, and a museum in Quebec wants to recreate that experience. The only difference? They’ll be using a 2,000-year-old sculpture.

For its new “My 2,000-Year-Old Double” project, the Musée de la Civilisation (Museum of Civilization) is on the hunt for people who are the modern-day twins of a selection of ancient Greek, Roman and Egyptian sculptures.

To find these lucky lookalikes, the museum’s website allows visitors to submit a photo of themselves (not smiling, cropped around the shoulders) into its database.

The software then scans the photo for 123 facial landmark points (nose width, eyebrow arch, etc.) and then compares that data with the same landmark points of 60 statues sampled from two Swiss art institutions.

The system will show you which statue matches your face best, and then send the results to the museum’s curators.

Those curators will then select 30 of what they consider to be the most impressive matches and feature them in their Doubles exhibit from October 24, 2018 to October 27, 2019.

The winners will be photographed by photographer François Brunelle – whose signature work reflects his fascination with people who look very much alike but aren’t related.

“If they have the same face, if they look alike, are they the same?” Brunelle muses in a video about the exhibit. “That’s the question I ask myself.”

Anyone is welcome to upload photos to the site and find out if, thousands of years ago, a king, gladiator or maybe even a goddess was walking around looking just like them.